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Topic: L2 SpaceX (Read 73859 times)

I'm mostly lurking on the forum - however, L2 keeps me sane in periods of SpaceX news drought. Clicked around in other L2 sections also, beautiful stuff there to keep you entertained for a long, long time.

I was a space history fan before I was a SpaceX fan. (I'm an older guy who remembers the glory days of the 1960s.) I discovered this site a few days before my birthday and decided to treat myself to a year's subscription.

I'm an occasional diarist on daily kos, a liberal political site, I posted the link to nasa spaceflight in a comment to an article musing about space exploration, maybe a few readers will stick to our flypaper.....

I've been a space enthusiast since infancy. I'm an amateur cartoonist - first thing I ever drew was a Saturn 1B in crayola, but I had never more than a layman's interest in the knitty gritty soot-coated specifics of spaceflight until my mid teens. I browsed the site for a few years, got an account, and upgraded to a year's L2 last year.

Unlike a lot of people here, space never motivated me to be an engineer. I was obsessed by the idea that the godlike abilities of the human race are but a dusting of nitrogen from being amusingly pathetic, however much we pride ourselves as possessing dominion over the forces of the universe.

Our earliest mythologies concern humanity's interaction with time. What time does to us, what it does to the world, what the separation of time creates. We created societies based upon lineage and time, and for thousands upon thousands of years time was the only element of the universe worthy of study. People moved as fast as the horse could carry them, if they were wealthy. If they were not, they moved as far as their feet could take them. Most people didn't leave the ten mile circumference around their birth place, around their sources of food. Distance was interesting, but time, time regulated everything. The cycle of crops, trade, what ships would come into port and when, when it was safe to go to sea, when to wake and when to sleep. Michel Foucault, writing in 'Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias', aptly observed that "The great obsession of the 19th century [and earlier] was, as we know, history". What had happened before an individual's life, more often than not, would determine the status of their life in the present. The "ever accumulating past" was critical to the human's perception of itself. Think of theology - most religions make a point that most prophecies have occurred, most prophets have existed, and all that remains is an (often predetermined) end of the world event. Man can no longer change the boundaries of reality. Aristocrats, slave owners and Emperors took their right to possess land (and people) from the fact their parents owned the same land and the parents of those presently bonded.

There is much to be said for having an old guard. Without generational ideologies, peace is impossible and we would live in total, undying anarchy as nobody agreed with anyone else on any subject ever. We could not exist as a species. There always have been mavericks, pushing technological mobility forwards, often resulting in social mobility as old, oppressive systems become impractical. Sometimes these futurist pursuits have negative results when they advance faster than the minds of the people controlling the technology - spears fly, gunpowder explodes, machine guns perforate, battleships sink, planes leave nobody to hide anywhere anymore, spy satellites know everything about you. Yet for every innovation that leads to violence results in hundreds to hundreds of thousands of positive applications. We have spectrometers, we have interplanetary probes, we have antibiotics, we have internal combustion engines. We can turn any surface on the planet into a cityscape if we just throw enough man hours into it.

With all these advances, time isn't quite so scary. We know how time relates to the universe, more or less. We know how to modulate our passage through time, how time is a horrifyingly complex tangle of micro-to-macrostructures moving at all manner of mindbending velocities. Our cities live in 24 hour electric sunrises. Time still concerns the average person, but it's the the great mystery anymore.

Before, we lived in a world with borders. Contrary to popular belief, people of Ptolemy's time and before knew that the world was round. Flat earther for the unenlightened was an insult even multi-millenia ago. For millennia people had been describing entities that could traverse through the celestial sphere in nearly every human culture, but the sky seemed a barrier reserved for beings with far longer lifespans than the average human. Individuals who could wield the power to destroy the world at whim, yet also had the power to be great creators, of the like mortality could not match. "The celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place." Yet it didn't prevent people from exploring space and exploiting what they found there. When humans ran out of ocean and regolith in the 19th century, we'd already invented balloons and started going up. Drills got better, as did submarines, and we started going down. We were a three dimensional species, and started exploring three dimensional space.

We're now at a time when we are rapidly running out of three dimensional space. This is a ludicrous situation in a universe that (for practical purposes), is infinite in a possibly infinite spectra of multiverses. SpaceX gives a chance at meaningful exploration within my lifetime on a timescale somewhat more tangible than sometime in the somethingth recurring, and L2 lets me get my fill of free wish fulfillment. What's not to like?

If you are a SpaceX fan to whatever degree and have a day job that requires your full attention, I highly recommend to you to NOT, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES, get a L2 membership.

There are days where I open the L2 section, not suspecting anything, then I read what awesome new details Chris or others have come forward with and -BAMM- my productivity for the day is gone. No way i can think about anything other then awesome rockets for the rest of the day...

And another warning: I cannot see how i do NOT prolong my L2 subscription once my 2nd term is up in a few months. It is just addictive. It literally gets my heart racing to read the stuff on L2. Be warned

I hope this is not too cheesy, but that's the way it is for me...

I can confirm - I was meant to start this obnoxious thing called a dissertation earlier this week, and then L2 came along and ruined it.

I'd like to bump this thread with my own little testimonial: I subscribed to L2 and have been loving it every day since. Buy the lifetime subscription. I go back to L2 every day. Most news breaks in L2 a couple days before it goes public. And the discussion there is just top notch! It is not uncommon that someone asks a question and within a couple hours someone with first-hand knowledge responds.

I'd like to bump this thread with my own little testimonial: I subscribed to L2 and have been loving it every day since. Buy the lifetime subscription. I go back to L2 every day. Most news breaks in L2 a couple days before it goes public. And the discussion there is just top notch! It is not uncommon that someone asks a question and within a couple hours someone with first-hand knowledge responds.

Thanks NSF for providing my daily space news fix!

And, out of appreciation, nothing stops a member from contributing more, or even a double lifetime membership fee. This provides exactly the same member benefits of a regular lifetime membership at exactly twice the cost. Servers cost money and for those that can, I recommend the double lifetime membership. (Note: This is not an official designation or membership level, and rumors that there is an “L3” are a fabrication of the party thread).

Logged

On the ground floor of the National Space Foundation... Colonize Mars!

"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Another thing you can do is give scholarships... there are many deserving students majoring in aeronautics or other space related disciplines that would love to have a year of L2....

Thank you for suggesting this as I'm a teacher and I've spent just an hour in L2 and already blown away by it. I have lurked here for a long time and the threads in the SpaceX section can run at a fast pace meaning it's hard to keep up, but L2 appears to be a lot more concentrated and content heavy. An actual resource that I imagine would fire up interest in entering the sector for students. I would fully support such an idea as above.

Another thing you can do is give scholarships... there are many deserving students majoring in aeronautics or other space related disciplines that would love to have a year of L2....

Thank you for suggesting this as I'm a teacher and I've spent just an hour in L2 and already blown away by it. I have lurked here for a long time and the threads in the SpaceX section can run at a fast pace meaning it's hard to keep up, but L2 appears to be a lot more concentrated and content heavy. An actual resource that I imagine would fire up interest in entering the sector for students. I would fully support such an idea as above.

I switched from yearly to lifelong when I started my PhD studies. Once my income once more increases I might return to reoccuring payments, either by "downgrade" to yearly or by pleading for several consecutive life sentences.

I switched from yearly to lifelong when I started my PhD studies. Once my income once more increases I might return to reoccuring payments, either by "downgrade" to yearly or by pleading for several consecutive life sentences.

For folks with lifetime memberships remember additional donations, gift memberships for students, etc can be sent. And if you are super-duper pleased with everything, consider the ( non-existent except in our own minds) double, or triple lifetime membership! All the same benefits as a single lifetime membership with bonus self-congratulations, smugness and satisfaction when visiting the site.